|Pipes on the Prairie

What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground

More than 11,000 oil wells have been drilled in North Dakota since 2006, covering the state’s agricultural landscape. In all, almost 40,000 miles of well bores have been drilled underground to connect the fracking operations to surface wells. Laid end to end, they would circle the Earth about one and a half times.

On Sunday, The New York Times published a monthslong investigation by Deborah Sontag and Robert Gebeloff into North Dakota’s conflicted relationship with its booming oil industry. In the process of reporting that article, we obtained the locations of every oil drilling line of every well in the state.

The precise depths and directions of these remain out of sight for a very obvious reason: The drilling lines are underground. Here, we change that.

The illustrations shown here are accurate in every respect except one: We changed the vertical direction of each oil well bore to go above ground instead of below it. Otherwise, every bore line is shown precisely how it’s described by North Dakota’s Department of Mineral Resources.

It’s an experiment that may depict the scale of a topic better than reality can.

View of the Bakken field

Below, a view of the Bakken field, covering more than 12,000 square miles of North Dakota, about 17 percent of the state’s land.

View of Missouri River and Fort Berthold Reservation

A closer view of the northwestern part of the state shows the concentration of oil wells alongside the Missouri River and in Fort Berthold, a Native American reservation around Lake Sakakawea.

Close-up view of Williston

Williston, the sixth-largest city in North Dakota, is surrounded by oil fields. It’s home to many of the workers who have moved to the state to get the wells flowing.